23 October 2016 1:59 AM

I confess I was rather looking forward to the arrival of the alleged ‘children’ from the Calais migrant camp. Leftists have an oily habit of stretching the definition of this emotional word. It helps them make the exaggerated claims of suffering, by which they so often achieve their political aims. I fully expected to see square-jawed, muscled, hairy young men of military age, and I have greatly enjoyed the embarrassment of the soppy idiots who spread and believed the propaganda about them. Of course it’s possible that they are all really 12, and have been terribly hardened by war and suffering. But if that is so, how come they are in a crime-ridden camp in France, which exists purely to besiege our borders and launch illegal attempts to cross them? Nobody ever asks how the inhabitants of this camp got there, because the answer in almost all cases is that they were trafficked there by well-paid crooks. What responsible parent would put an actual child in the hands of such people, notorious worldwide for their ruthlessness? And why are we supposed to be so tear-stained that these people are stuck in France? France, the last time I looked, was one of the most civilised countries in the world. It is not a war zone. Nobody starves there. There are schools. Many fashionable British liberals own houses there. The quality of the coffee has gone down a bit in recent years, but that is no reason to stow away in a lorry or climb a 15ft fence so you can move to Tottenham or Slough.So what are these enormous, prematurely aged children fleeing from? Why must they come here? And then, while the self-righteous pro-migrant faction are failing to answer these questions (they cannot), along comes somebody to compare these events with the 1938-1940 Kindertransport trains which carried Jewish children out of the reach of Hitler. Baloney. The comparison is false and, in my view, disgraceful because it diminishes the horror of the past to make a cheap propaganda point about the present. After the highly public Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, in which Jews under Nazi rule were lawlessly murdered, beaten, robbed and dragged off to prison camps without trial because they were Jews, nobody had any excuse for not helping Jews to leave the Third Reich. Mass murder was plainly the next step. These were real refugees from actual persecution (and it remains our shame that we allowed only the children in, leaving their parents behind to be slaughtered). Look at the pictures from this era. The children involved have been torn from families, in many cases seen their homes defiled or torched, their parents obscenely humiliated in front of them. Yet somehow they remained children. Pity and mercy are precious things, qualities given to us to keep us human. Those who seek to exploit these emotions for political ends, to play upon real feelings for fake purposes, have much to answer for.

This is NOT justice - it's a witch hunt

The Great Child Abuse Inquiry continues to devour itself, in a storm of rumour and whispers. There is some justice in this.

The whole idea that this country is waist-deep in unprosecuted abuse scandals has always been based on allegations that cannot be objectively proved. Now this industry is the target of its own methods.

The whole country has become a vast kangaroo court, in which guilty and innocent alike are accused, and in many cases we can never find the truth.

For a year, I have been fighting the case of the late Bishop George Bell, whose courage and principle I have long admired, who was suddenly accused of long-ago child abuse by a solitary complainant, 57 years after his death. No other accusers have come forward.

To begin with, his own church, aided by several newspapers, the BBC and the police, acted disgracefully as if his guilt was proven. The police even said they would have arrested him if he hadn’t been dead, an absurd and meaningless statement which persuaded many he was guilty.

Now, thanks to relentless pressure by many good people, plus me, the BBC have honourably retreated, the police have softened their line, and the Church themselves have published a booklet about Chichester Cathedral in which they admit that the charges against Bishop Bell have never been tested in any court and are just ‘plausible’, a feeble word given that the accusation, if true, would strip away his good name for ever.

It’s not enough. But it took all the running we could do just to stay in the same place, returning to the old English custom that all are presumed innocent until guilt is proven. If the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary could grasp this point, their hopeless inquiry could be shut down before it soaks up the entire national budget and we could go back to proper British justice.

The best summary of what is wrong with our selection-by-wealth comprehensive school system comes from a campaigner against Kent’s excellent if oversubscribed surviving grammar schools.

One of her children didn’t pass the test. Her reaction? ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me. We shopped at Waitrose.’

Don't panic! They're just sad old wrecks

How we love to frighten ourselves about those wicked Russians.

There was a sort of frenzy on Friday as portions of Moscow’s museum-piece fleet slogged past the White Cliffs of Dover, as if the Spanish Armada were at our gates.

Actually the Channel is an international waterway, and we don’t own it. Russia (whose Gross Domestic Product is smaller than Italy’s) is quite entitled to send her ships through it. And Russia is in no fit state to invade anything much larger than Rutland.

The Russian ships are handsome, but doddery. The ancient Soviet-era carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, started life in a Ukrainian shipyard and was then named after the decrepit Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

She left a shocking trail of black smoke as if she was burning coal.

Her main escort, the outwardly majestic Peter The Great (originally named after the KGB chief Yuri Andropov), recently spent two years rusting gently, tied up at Severomorsk.

No wonder, given that most of her class are unusable thanks to wonky nuclear reactors.

The really sad thing is that, having madly scrapped our own carriers and sold off the Harriers that flew from them, not to mention axeing a huge number of destroyers and frigates, we have reduced our own naval power to a pathetic level. Is it perhaps envy that makes us so fretful?

If Russia is now better at projecting power in the Middle East than we are, it is because we are weak by choice, not because Moscow is strong.

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It will be good for Britain if Jeremy Corbyn wins his fight to stay as leader of the Labour Party. I agree with the late Queen Mother that the best political arrangement for this country is a good old-fashioned conservative government kept on its toes by a strong Labour Opposition.There’s no sign of a good old-fashioned conservative government. But Mr Corbyn speaks for a lot of people who feel left out of the recovery we are supposed to be having, and they need a powerful voice in Parliament. There is nothing good (or conservative) about low wages, insecure jobs and a mad housing market which offers nothing but cramped rooms and high rents to young families just when they need space, proper houses with gardens, and security.I only wish the voiceless millions of conservative patriots had a spokesman as clear and resolute as Mr Corbyn is for his side. The truth is that both major parties have been taken over by the same cult, the Clinton-Blair fantasy that globalism, open borders and mass immigration will save the great nations of the West.It hasn’t worked. In the USA it has failed so badly that the infuriated, scorned, impoverished voters of Middle America are on the point of electing a fake-conservative yahoo businessman as President.So far we have been gentler with our complacent elite, perhaps too gentle. Our referendum majority for leaving the EU was a deep protest against many things. But it did not actually throw hundreds of useless MPs out on their ears, as needs to be done. They are all still there, drawing their pay and expenses.So the Establishment has yet to realise just how much fury and impatience were expressed in that vote. Now we are in a very dangerous place. Theresa May’s back-to-normal Government has no idea how much disappointed rage it will unleash if it fails to regain control of our borders in the coming negotiations with the EU. Mrs May thinks she can fudge it, delay it and bog it down, so that at the end we can move from being half in the EU to being half out of it. She thinks she can outfox the anti-EU figures in her own party.Maybe she can. But she cannot outfox the angry people who have demanded something and still hope and intend to get it. And if she tries, she will risk the appearance of a British Trump, a disaster for all of us.If Mr Corbyn wins, our existing party system will begin to totter. The Labour Party must split between old-fashioned radicals like him, and complacent smoothies from the Blair age. And since Labour MPs have far more in common with Mrs May than with Mr Corbyn, there is only one direction they can take. They will have to snuggle up beside her absurdly misnamed Conservative Party. And so at last the British public will see clearly revealed the truth they have long avoided – that the two main parties are joined in an alliance against them.And they may grasp that their only response is to form an alliance against the two big parties. Impossible? Look how quickly this happened in Scotland.The Prime Minister may come to regret her vain, boastful behaviour at Question Time last Wednesday, when she bragged about how big her party was and how it was united behind her. These things can change, and very fast. I think she will know these words: ‘Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.’It may not be very long before she sits on the Opposition benches, with a broken and hostile party behind her.

You don't look much like a 'Royal basher' now, Liz

I greatly enjoyed seeing Ms Liz Truss, the new Lord Chancellor, in her majestic Tudor-style robes of office, redolent of old England, tradition and deference.It is amusing to recall Ms Truss’s radical anti-Monarchy speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in 1994 (she was once on the national executive committee of that party’s youth and student wing) when she proclaimed: ‘We do not believe people are born to rule.’ Her target was the Queen. She found out soon afterwards that Oxford graduates in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, such as herself, are indeed born to rule, and it doesn’t much matter which party they are in. I’m sure she’ll enjoy the many conversations with Her Majesty she’ll now have, thanks to her new high office.

Trident blows our defence apart

How sad that the argument about replacing Trident submarines is always expressed as Trident or nothing. The insane cost of this weapon is destroying the Royal Navy and the Army. I’ve said before that spending £100 billion on Trident and neglecting conventional forces is like spending so much on insuring yourself against alien abduction that you can’t afford cover against fire and theft. And so it is.But it’s worse than that. Trident was designed to deter the USSR, a state that ceased to exist 25 years ago. The system isn’t independent. The USA owns and services the missiles and knows where our submarines are. To be really independent, it would have to be usable even if the USA didn’t want us to use it. It isn’t.Sir Michael Quinlan, the brilliant civil servant who strove to maintain a British nuclear deterrent, said before he died in 2009 that even he wasn’t in favour of Trident at any price. The truth is that nuclear weapons are a giant bluff. I don’t believe Mrs May, whose Christian faith I don’t doubt, would ever actually order a nuclear strike on a populated city. But she has to pretend she might and we have to pretend to be able to. All we need to do is to hang on to a few H-bombs and the planes to drop them and we can have all that Trident gives us, for 100th of the cost. We might also be able to afford a Navy and an Army again, not to mention boats to patrol our coasts, which we haven’t got at the moment.

Broken Windows Theory

Remember that window in Angela Eagle’s Labour party office in Wallasey, that was supposed to have been broken? Remember the insinuation that this had been done by wicked Corbynites? Well, I asked Merseyside Police, and they told me that the window wasn’t that of Mrs Eagle’s office, which wasn’t broken. It was the window of a stairwell and hallway, in an office building which Wallasey Labour Party shares with several others. Bear this in mind when reading coverage of this contest.

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12 June 2016 1:57 AM

I think we are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it.

If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?

I am genuinely unsure how this will work out. I hope it will only destroy our two dead political parties, stiffened corpses that have long propped each other up with the aid of BBC endorsement and ill-gotten money.

I was wrong to think that the EU referendum would be so hopelessly rigged that the campaign for independence was doomed to lose. I overestimated the Prime Minister – a difficult thing for me to do since my opinion of him was so low. I did not think he could possibly have promised this vote with so little thought, preparation or skill.

I underestimated the BBC, which has, perhaps thanks to years of justified and correct criticism from people such as me, taken its duty of impartiality seriously.

Everything I hear now suggests that the votes for Leave are piling up, while the Remain cause is faltering and floundering. The betrayed supporters of both major parties now feel free to take revenge on their smug and arrogant leaders.

It has been a mystery to me that these voters stayed loyal to organisations that repeatedly spat on them from a great height. Labour doesn’t love the poor. It loves the London elite. The Tories don’t love the country. They love only money. The referendum, in which the parties are split and uncertain, has freed us all from silly tribal loyalties and allowed us to vote instead according to reason. We can all vote against the heedless, arrogant snobs who inflicted mass immigration on the poor (while making sure they lived far from its consequences themselves). And nobody can call us ‘racists’ for doing so. That’s not to say that the voters are ignoring the actual issue of EU membership as a whole. As I have known for decades, this country has gained nothing from belonging to the European Union, and lost a great deal.

If Zambia can be independent, why cannot we? If membership is so good for us, why has it been accompanied by savage industrial and commercial decline? If the Brussels system of sclerotic, centralised bureaucracy is so good, why doesn’t anyone else in the world adopt it?

As for the clueless drivel about independence campaigners being hostile to foreigners or narrow-minded, this is mere ignorant snobbery. I’ll take on any of them in a competition as to who has travelled most widely, in Europe and beyond it. Good heavens, I’ve even read Tolstoy and like listening to Beethoven. And I still want to leave the EU.

Do these people even know what they are saying when they call us ‘Little Englanders’?

England has never been more little than it is now, a subject province of someone else’s empire.

I have to say that this isn’t the way out I would have chosen, and that I hate referendums because I love our ancient Parliament. And, as I loathe anarchy and chaos, I fear the crisis that I think is coming.

I hope we produce people capable of handling it. I wouldn’t have started from here. But despite all this, it is still rather thrilling to see the British people stirring at last after a long, long sleep.

Two more victims of the Great Terror Panic

Our state-sponsored panic about the exaggerated terror threat is driving us mad. Recently I wrote about Lorna Moore, a young woman ripped from her children and flung into jail because she didn’t warn the authorities about something her husband (an alleged terrorist) probably didn’t even do.

Now we see an organic farmer, John Letts, and his wife Sally Lane, both in their 50s, remanded in custody on charges of sending money to their son. He may be up to no good in Syria, but that (unsurprisingly) hasn’t stopped them loving and caring for their child. Remanded in custody? From what I can see from court reports, the country is crawling with gaunt young men out on bail for violent crimes. So why are these two gentle people (who have another son at home) banged up in the cells and denied bail, while scores of dangerous louts roam the streets?

It is because of the magic word ‘terror’. It stops us thinking. Look at the Leytonstone knifeman, Muhaydin Mire. Back in December his crime – a horrible, bloody, random attack on a passer-by in a London Underground station – led the news. He was thought to be a terrorist. A man who called out ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv’ was much praised.

But he wasn’t no terrorist, either, bruv. When he was convicted on Thursday, the case was relegated to inside pages.

The attack was just as severe, the wounds just as deep, the crime just as bad.

But it’s now accepted by almost everyone involved that Mire was mentally ill. His family believe that this was caused by his use of the supposedly ‘soft’ drug cannabis – the one Richard Branson and Nick Clegg want to decriminalise. In fact, his family very responsibly tried to warn the police that he was a risk before the crime, and the police passed the buck, because nobody mentioned ‘radicalisation’.

Well, perhaps if the police and the courts were more interested in cannabis (which remains illegal, though they don’t enforce the law) than in terrorism and ‘radicalisation’, we’d actually be safer from the real and growing threat of unhinged young men wandering about in our midst. Some hope, but I thought I’d mention it.

******

What are British troops doing in Poland? Taking part in a ridiculous exercise in which we pretend that we would go to war in the event of a Russian attack in the region – which is about as unlikely as a Martian invasion. Actually, we’d be hard put to defend the Isle of Wight these days, let alone Warsaw or Riga. This folly creates the very problem it pretends to deal with – tension and fear. Why?

******

Sorry Meryl, I can't laugh at a man who's so scary

How odd that Meryl Streep, dressing up as Donald Trump last week, looks more like that noisy businessman than Mr Trump does himself. I am tempted to laugh. And then I stop myself.

Mr Trump’s rallies increasingly attract violence – by his opponents and his supporters. I actually find this terrifying. Any fool can start civil unrest and fan a populist bonfire by saying what he thinks the masses want to hear. But it is far harder to restore calm. I gasp at Mr Trump’s irresponsibility, and fear for the USA.

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29 November 2015 1:43 AM

Once again, as a patriotic Englishman from a Naval family, I stand amazed to find myself so lonely in my doubts about a foolish war.

I am no pacifist. I supported the retaking of the Falklands, national territory illegally seized by foreign invaders. I was thrilled to see that the Royal Navy could still do the hard tasks for which it is paid too little. Could it now?

Yet, on the basis of an emotional spasm and a speech that was illogical and factually weak, we are rushing towards yet another swamp, from which we will struggle to extract ourselves and where we can do no conceivable good.

Heaven forbid that it will lead (as other such adventures have) to more melancholy processions, bearing flag-wrapped coffins, from RAF Brize Norton; or to quieter convoys, carrying terribly injured men to special hospitals. Why must good, brave, dutiful men and women die or be maimed for life because our politicians are vain and ignorant?

But there is no knowing the end of this, especially given the Prime Minister’s absurd belief that we have 70,000 ‘moderate’ allies just waiting to help us in Syria. Among these scattered ‘moderates’ are those who last week murdered a Russian pilot as he parachuted to earth, and mauled his corpse.

When this phantom army turns out to be non-existent, or hostile, how long will it take Mr Cameron to return to the House of Commons, pleading oh-so-reasonably for ground troops to follow?

It is all such rubbish. I have yet to see conclusive evidence that the Paris murders were organised by or in Islamic State. France has plenty of home-grown hatred and (despite strict gun laws) is awash with illegal Kalashnikovs and ammunition.

Nor can I see why bombing Raqqa will defend us or anyone against such murders.

France’s President Hollande, a failed politician in bad domestic trouble, mired his own country in Syria months ago. I can’t see what good reason we have to follow him there. It will not help to bind up the wounds of the people of France.

Only three weeks back, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee advised, in a carefully argued report, that intervention in Syria is not a good idea. The pathetic cave-in of that committee’s chairman, Crispin Blunt, who now supports Mr Cameron’s latest war, merely makes Mr Blunt look irrational, weak-minded and easily led.

The UN Security Council resolution (of which Mr Cameron makes so much) actually offers no legal basis for military action. Nor does it cite Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which authorises the use of force.

David Cameron is already suffering from galloping Churchill syndrome (the patient growls, denounces his critics as appeasers, and starts wars). Now he seems to have contracted Blair’s disorder, an irresistible desire to pose alongside military hardware. On Monday he managed to have his portrait taken next to a very macho-looking Typhoon fighter jet at Northolt RAF base on his way back from Paris. Odd, that. Typhoons are not normally stationed at Northolt, and I haven’t been able to get a coherent explanation of what military reason it had to be there, so convenient for a photo-opportunity.

The Prime Minister might have been better employed looking up Syria on a map, reading the relevant documents, or consulting with our former ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford – who energetically opposes what he denounces as ‘recreational bombing’.

In all these modern wars real experts are impatiently pushed aside, while flatterers and yes-men take over. But it’s not decided yet. There’s still just time to write to your MP, if you agree with me that this is folly. I beg you to do so.

Reaping a feminist whirlwind

On Thursday night I witnessed the ugliness of the new student intolerance at the Oxford Union, where I was taking part in a debate on marriage (I was in favour). I had never before seen burly security men stationed around the hall, or had to watch as screeching hecklers – having ignored pleas to put questions in a civilised way – were hauled from the room.

It was Germaine Greer they were mainly after (though they handed out leaflets at the gate slandering me, too). I like Germaine, as it happens, and think she is often a lot more sensible than people think she is. But does she ever wonder if the militant feminism she launched has some responsibility for the new generation of self-righteous would-be censors who would rather silence an opponent than listen to her?

****

I travel a lot by train, and have begun to notice that the ride is getting much rougher. On a recent journey from London to Edinburgh I had to move seats because I was over the wheels and being jolted about so much. It reminded me of the Mandalay-Rangoon express (though in its grimy way that’s more comfortable than Virgin).

The worrying thing is that I noticed a similar worsening in the track at the end of the 1990s, just before a terrible series of crashes caused by track failure. Is Network Rail maintaining our lines properly?

****

The turmoil of the past two weeks has buried two pieces of bad news which the Government really doesn’t want you to know.

The first was Thursday’s record net immigration figures, showing that Mr Cameron has completely lost control of our borders.

The other was a huge and unexpected increase in Government borrowing in October, when it was supposed to have fallen. This passed almost entirely unnoticed.

No wonder the Chancellor seems to have put the economy in the hands of Doctor Who. The mythical £27 billion that he miraculously discovered in time for his Autumn Statement is even more non-existent than the Prime Minister’s imaginary army of 70,000 Syrian moderates.

Doctor Who will be needed to get hold of this money, since it does not yet exist, and is to be found (if at all) only in the future, and then in small annual dribs and drabs.

If George Osborne were a company, he would be heading for bankruptcy. As it is, I confidently predict very severe tax rises within three years. Perhaps Doctor Who will by then have replaced Mr Osborne at No 11 and will be able to escape the voters’ wrath in his Tardis.

*******

All the four main unpopular newspapers had virtually the same page one headline on Friday morning: The Times’: ‘Labour at war over vote to bomb Isis’, The Telegraph: ‘Labour at war over Syria air strikes’; ‘The Guardian: ‘Labour in Syria Turmoil as PM makes the case for war’; ‘The Independent’ : ‘Labour at war over air strikes in Syria’. The BBC’s headlines were very similar.

None of these stories contained any clear facts, just anonymous briefings. If it had been a plane crash, or a verdict in a major court case, this sort of unanimity in supposedly competing media would have been normal. But in this case it looks much more as if we have a controlled press.

(This last item was accidentally omitted when the column was first posted)

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11 November 2015 5:26 PM

Shortly after a now-retired (but then active) senior general criticised our involvement in Iraq (which I rejoiced over) I ran into an old acquaintance , a very senior former diplomat, who was spitting teeth and blood over the general’s performance. The man was a complete fool to step so far outside his own responsibilities. It didn’t matter what he had said (the diplomat was inclined to agree with him). Generals just didn’t make political statements in a law-governed country run by the Queen in Parliament, and that was that.

Chastened, I realized I’d been guilty of one of the great sins of politics – forgetting principles for a temporary advantage.

So I moderated my sympathy for the general (who later turned out to be a bit of a disappointment in other ways). In the end, constitutional rectitude was more important than hearing something you agreed with from an important person, especially from a senior soldier.

There’s an argument for saying that this country last underwent a major military intervention in politics in 1688, when John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough rather trickily helped Dutch William remove James II from the throne. Then there was the so-called Curragh Mutiny against the Liberals’ Irish Home Rule policy (which was quite serious) , and there were various wild mutterings during Harold Wilson’s years, but I don’t think these can be taken seriously.

So when General Sir Nicholas Houghton, head of the Armed Forces, Chief of the Defence Staff, appeared on TV on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday ( a transcript can be found here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/08111503.pdf ), I must admit I wasn’t sure he should be there at all. This is a programme on which politicians are interviewed. The general isn’t one. Very important questions arise. Does anyone know the answers? What was he doing there? Who had authorised him, if anyone? Had he consulted with Ministers or other officers before agreeing to do this? Whose idea was it? Is there a precedent?

Sir Nicholas is, ultimately, the employee and subordinate of the Queen in Parliament. There are other countries where this does not apply, but that is their problem. Here, it is so. The government decides what he must do and what policy he must follow. If he does not like it, he can protest to ministers, up to the Prime Minister, to whom he has access. And if they ignore him, he can either do as they say, or resign.

That’s it, and that’s as it should be. As for his private politics and beliefs, he may be, if he so wishes, a nudist, a vegetarian or a Warmist, a socialist or a liberal or a conservative. It would be interesting to see if he could, even in private, be a Muslim or a UKIP member in practice. I can see either causing difficulties. . He couldn’t be a pacifist because it would make it impossible for him to do his job. By the way, id not think Jeremy Corbyn, who will feature in this post later, is an actual pacifist, just a man very reluctant to support war (as I am). If I am wrong, I should be grateful for chapter and verse.

The general (though he isn't) might well be an opponent of the replacement of Britain’s (to my mind ridiculous, unusable and absurdly large) Trident nuclear ‘deterrent’. I qualify the word ‘deterrent’ because for some years I have been unable to answer the question ‘Who or what does Trident actually deter, who is a) interested in a nuclear attack on Britain and b) capable of mounting one?’

Quite a few senior officers in all three services are, I believe, privately against this renewal, as they are aware that this country’s conventional armed forces are a shell - an array of ageing equipment, in diminishing quantities, manned by shrinking numbers of servicemen and women who increasingly lack the necessary training to handle them well in times of need, as the most experienced are most likely to leave, and the pressure this places on those who remain then drives more away.

I noticed (it is alas behind a paywall) the retired Major-General Sir Patrick Cordingley (he retired 15 years ago and so is free to speak as he wishes) wrote an article in ‘The Times today (11th November) making the case for getting rid of Trident. We don’t really control it, in effect it is part of the US Fleet. Its running costs are £4,000,000,000 a year and the replacement costs could run to £100,000,000,000 over thirty years, a strange expenditure for a country with an annual deficit of billions and an accumulated state debt of £1,500,000,000,000. I think these noughts are right. We could make much better use of this money.

Plainly, Sir Nicholas Houghton doesn’t agree with this, as I’ll discuss in a moment. He’s also very onside with the Cameron view of ISIS as an ‘existential threat to this country ( a view I think questionable. How much do they really care about us?) , saying: ‘And I think when the Prime Minister speaks like that, I don’t think he necessarily means in terms of they’re going to come and take our territory off us, but I think in terms of to undermine our way of life, our freedoms, our liberty, you know the values we stand for. I think that’s the true nature of the existential threat that a threat like ISIS does or has the potential to present.’

An interesting opinion but should we know he has it? If so, why? What would happen if he didn't have it, and instead said that he thought further interventions in the Middle East were a silly and dangerous waste of time? Would it be all right for him to say that on the BBC on Sunday morning?

Then there’s this :’ And if you’d indulge me, I think from a national perspective the only thing that we can unilaterally own as a country is a strategy about ISIS that keeps the country and the people of this country safe, and that’s why our national strategy is all about border security, the remarkable work of our intelligence services in intelligence led operations within the country, reaching out through the Muslim society within the country to assist them in deradicalising and delegitimising ISIS.’

This also sounds like the normal talk of a Tory cabinet minister – but is it right that it should be said by a senior serving general? Why should we know he thinks this? Would we be any worse off if he kept quiet?

What’s interesting is how vague and roundabout he becomes as soon as the really hot issue of his job – military spending – is discussed.

For example, this passage:

Sir Nicholas ‘…but I think the domestic situation has changed. I think we do have to sort of base as we look forward to this defence review, which should be one that is primarily about confidence and optimism and a reassurance to the people of the country, that there’s got to be a bit of realism in the fact that the world has become a somewhat more dangerous place. If you like, the latent threats have become patent ones.

ANDREW MARR: ‘So on defence spending George Osborne has promised you the NATO 2 percent, the extra spending, but are you concerned the Chancellor and the Treasury might start to kind of nibble away at that by adding things like military pensions into it?’

GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Well I think it would be a miracle if the Defence and the Treasury did not submit to NATO those things that it is permissible under the NATO rules to claim as national defence expenditure. My concern is that however the figures are done, there is real additional spending available for defence, and that is absolutely the case. And so if you like for the first time in a long time, probably 25 years, what this forthcoming SDSR is about is not the management of decline but the management of betterment.’

This hesitancy and qualification ( be honest - it''s not exactly a headlong charge in the general direction of the Treasury, is it?) slightly fade away when the subject of Trident and Jeremy Corbyn comes up.

ANDREW MARR: ‘...Of course we now have the leader of the opposition who says quite openly he would never press the nuclear button. Does that worry you? ‘

GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Well it … it would worry me if that, er, thought was translated into power as it were because … ‘

ANDREW MARR: ‘So if he wins, he’s a problem?’

GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Well there’s a couple of hurdles to cross before we get to that.’

ANDREW MARR: ‘Of course’.

GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘But the reason I say this – and it’s not based on a personal thing at all, it’s purely based on the credibility of deterrence. The whole thing about deterrence rests on the credibility of its use. When people say you’re never going to use the deterrent, what I say is you use the deterrent you know every second of every minute of every day and the purpose of the deterrent is that you don’t have to use it because you successfully deter.’

ANDREW MARR: ‘So no point at all in spending billions and billions of pounds if our enemies think we’d never use it?’

GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Yeah because deterrence is then completely undermined. And I think people have got to … You know politic… Most of the politicians I know understand that and I think that, dare I say, the responsibility of power is probably quite a sobering thing and you come to a realisation “I understand how this thing works”.’

Well now: First of all there’s that ‘When people say you’re never going to use the deterrent, what I say is you use the deterrent you know every second of every minute of every day and the purpose of the deterrent is that you don’t have to use it because you successfully deter.’

Really? Once again, who and what are we deterring? Why do we need this vast American-controlled apparatus to do so, a complex and vastly technical thing whose main purpose is to bomb Moscow, which we no longer have any need to do, since the vast Soviet Army has been disbanded, the Warsaw Pact has ceased to exist and Moscow no longer dominates Europe in the absence of nuclear deterrence. as it so definitely did before 1989? By all means (here I differ with Sir Patrick Cordingley’s vapourings about the UN and setting an example, which are absurd) hang on to a few free-fall atomic bombs and fit our submarines with submarine-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. But Trident? What is it for? Whose is it? Whom does it deter? How?

But then there’s the deep unwisdom of being drawn into political discussion. When asked about Mr Corbyn (or ISIS, or anything else) Sir Nicholas could perfectly easily have said that these were matters for politicians, about which he, a simple soldier, was not entitled to comment.

But this exchange :

ANDREW MARR: ‘So no point at all in spending billions and billions of pounds if our enemies think we’d never use it?’

GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Yeah because deterrence is then completely undermined’

And this one:

ANDREW MARR: ‘...Of course we now have the leader of the opposition who says quite openly he would never press the nuclear button. Does that worry you?

GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: Well it … it would worry me if that, er, thought was translated into power as it were because …

ANDREW MARR: ‘So if he wins, he’s a problem?’

GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Well there’s a couple of hurdles to cross before we get to that.’

...are serious breaches of the wise rule that generals stay out of politics. Andrew Marr has a story to get, and knows how to get it. The general, who could no doubt outfox a pincer attack in the field, fell straight into Field Marshal Marr’s trap and gave him the headline he wanted. 'Top General attacks Corbyn’s pledge not to use bomb.' Etc etc.

Of course a lot of pro-Tory Blairite politicians and media were really relaxed about this. But that’s because they think the public is right behind Trident (a thing most of them barely understand, and worship as a sort of fetish of machismo).

But what if the General had said instead that Trident was a colossal waste of money, was bleeding the defence budget dry, and served no observable military purpose.

Why, then the air would have been thick with yells about political generals speaking out of turn, and demands for his sacking. Well, if he’s allowed to say what he said on the Marr show, then he (or his successors) should equally well be allowed to say that Trident is a heap of worthless junk. You can’t have it both ways. Me, I still think generals should keep out of politics, always. Once you breach that principle, you endanger the constitution.

I also wonder what Mr Cameron really, really thinks in those long dark nights, when he ponders what he would do if he had to decide whether to retaliate to a nuclear attack ( I can’t think where it might come from, but never mind). I’d like to see someone press him hard on that.

04 October 2015 1:48 AM

I don’t think the British or American governments really want to fight the Islamic State. They just want to look as if they are doing so.

I judge these people by what they do, not by what they say. And in recent months I have noticed them doing – and not doing – some very interesting things.

The White House and Downing Street both seethe with genuine outrage about Russia’s bombing raids on Syria.

Yet the people Vladimir Putin bombed have views and aims that would get them rounded up as dangerous Islamist extremists if they turned up in Manchester. So why do British politicians call them ‘moderates’ when Russia bombs them?

It’s not as if London or Washington can claim to be squeamish about bombing as a method of war. We have done our fair share of it in Belgrade, Baghdad and Tripoli, where our bombs certainly (if unintentionally) killed innocent civilians, including small children.

Then there’s the curious case of Turkey. Rather like Russia, Turkey suddenly announced last summer that it was sending its bombers in to fight against the Islamic State.

But in fact Turkey barely bothered to attack IS at all. It has spent most of the past few months blasting the daylights out of the Kurdish militias, a policy that Turkey’s President Erdogan has selfish reasons for following.

Yet the Kurds, alongside the Syrian army, have been by far the most effective resistance to IS on the ground. Why then does a key member of the alleged anti-IS coalition go to war against them?

Turkey, a Nato member, is not criticised for this behaviour by Western politicians or by the feeble, slavish Western media. These geniuses never attack our foreign policy mistakes while we are making them. They wait until they have actually ended in disaster. Then they pretend to have been against them all along.

I’ve grown tired of people impersonating world-weary cynics by intoning the old saying ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ as if it were a new-minted witticism.

But in this case, this sensible old rule seems to have been dropped. Instead, our enemy’s enemies – in the case of the Kurds, Syria’s government and the Russians – are mysteriously our enemies too.

Meanwhile the Turkish enemies of our Kurdish friends are somehow or other still our noble allies.

Stalin became our ally when the Nazis invaded Russia. Churchill, a lifelong foe of Soviet communism, immediately grasped that times had changed. ‘If Hitler invaded Hell,’ he said ‘I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’

That is because, in body, heart and soul, sleeping and waking, with all the force and spirit he possessed, he was committed to the fight against Hitler above all things. So he would have accepted any ally against him.

Is this true of our leaders, who constantly portray Assad (and Putin) as Hitler, who imagine themselves as modern Churchills and condemn their critics as ‘appeasers’?

No. They play both ends against the middle. Their anti-extremist rhetoric, turned up full when confronting Birmingham schoolteachers or bearded preachers, drops to a whisper when they want to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, the home of Islamist fanaticism.

Things are not what they seem to be here. Russia’s action may be rash and dangerous. It may fail, especially as we are obviously trying so hard to undermine it. But at least it is honest and straightforward.

A new look set to sweep the nation

A hijab-wearing model, Mariah Idrissi, has been chosen for a new advertisement by the fashion chain H&M.

I think we will be amazed at how quickly this becomes normal. It won’t be long before we have veiled Muslim Cabinet Ministers, TV newsreaders and judges. It is all part of a slow but unstoppable adaptation of this country to Islam.

In my view it will eventually mean that non-Muslim women will come under pressure to conform.

If you doubt the power of this huge change, consider this. There are archive films available showing women in Afghanistan and the Arab Middle East dressed in Western styles. It has taken only 40 years for them to disappear beneath scarves and shrouds. The process may be quicker for us.

The hard-Left menace we ignored

The continued rage about Jeremy Corbyn’s rather dated Leftism baffles me. Most British journalists weren’t (as I was) members of the Labour Party in the 1980s. In the months before I quit, I used to be angrily called to order by the chairwoman of my local party. She was cross with me for (as she put it) provoking too much heckling from noisily pro-IRA, ban-the-bomb types.

Meanwhile, the real Left worked by stealth. That is why our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction’s ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

An astonishing number of senior New Labour people, from Peter Mandelson to Alan Milburn, are former Marxist comrades who have never been subjected to the sort of in-depth digging into their pasts that Jeremy Corbyn faces. Why is this? Is one kind of Marxism OK, and the other sort not? Or is it just that most political writers are clueless about politics?

Well I never. Schools that introduce the Daily Mile – encouraging children to walk or run a mile during school time – report more attentive, happier pupils who look as children used to look before we locked them in cars and houses and abandoned them to TVs and computer screens.

This news will be unwelcome to the potent lobby which urges the drugging of children to make them behave in boring classrooms and exercise-free schools, a disgusting barbarity that will one day be looked on with horror.

I’ve tried many times to set out the case against the wicked fantasy of ‘ADHD’, which usually earns me nothing but ignorant rage in return. But perhaps a rather clever new novel will succeed where I have failed.

I do urge you to read Concentr8 by William Sutcliffe (Bloomsbury £12.99), set in the very near future in a London convulsed by riots, ruled by a fameseeking mayor with eccentric hair.

Many of the most shocking passages in it – concerning the cynicism of the drug industry and of doctors about the use of mind-altering drugs to control the young – are not fiction but researched fact. Also, you’ll be interested to find out what happens to the mayor’s hair in the end.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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27 July 2015 4:17 PM

Yesterday my colleague Martin Beckford had a tremendous scoop in the Mail on Sunday . As usual, we had several such scoops, so his was not on the front but prominently displayed on page 5, a right-hand page (these catch the eye rather more than left-hand pages) .

Martin wrote : ‘A TOP-SECRET plan for the mass deployment of armed troops on the streets of Britain in the wake of a major terrorist attack can be revealed for the first time today.

More than 5,000 heavily armed soldiers would be sent to inner cities if Islamic State or other fanatics launched multiple attacks on British soil - an unprecedented military response to terrorism.

The shocking plans for 'large-scale military support' to the police are contained in documents uncovered by The Mail on Sunday. They have been drawn up by police chiefs and are being discussed at the highest levels of Government, but have never been revealed in public or mentioned in Parliament.

The mass deployment of Army personnel on the streets of mainland Britain would be hugely controversial, even if it helped keep the population safe, because it could give the impression that the Government had lost control or that martial law was being imposed.

Baroness Jones, who sits on London's Police and Crime Committee, said she was 'shocked' at the plans, saying: 'This would be unprecedented on mainland Britain.' And she expressed concern that the troops would not be sufficiently trained to protect civil liberties.

Some police leaders fear that the soldiers would be needed if there were a wave of attacks by extremists inspired by Islamic State or Al-Qaeda, as police forces no longer have enough manpower to cope.

It can also be disclosed today that, one week after this year's Paris massacres, senior police officers discussed raising the terror threat level in Britain from 'severe' to the highest level of 'critical', meaning a terror attack is 'imminent' rather than 'highly likely'. But in the end the level was kept at 'severe'.

The military contingency plan is revealed in the minutes of a National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) meeting held on April 22 at a hotel in Leicester. Documents accidentally uploaded to the NPCC website give details of what was discussed in a closed session.

Under the heading 'COUNTER TERRORISM POST PARIS LARGE SCALE MILITARY SUPPORT TO THE POLICE', the minutes reveal that deputy chief constable Simon Chesterman, the 'national lead' for armed policing, briefed the other chief officers. The paper says up to 5,100 troops could be deployed 'based upon force assessments of how many military officers could augment armed police officers engaged in protective security duties'.

'Discussions were ongoing with Government', the minutes added, saying: 'Chiefs recognised that the Army played an important part in national resilience and supported the work going forward.'

After being spotted by this newspaper, this section was removed from the NPCC website on Friday.

Sources confirmed the detailed plan had been discussed at the highest level and would only be triggered by the Cobra committee chaired by the Prime Minister if there were two or three terror attacks at the same time in Britain, leaving police struggling to respond. Will Riches, vice-chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said: 'The bottom line is you can't reduce 17,000 police officers and expect nothing to change.’

The story was followed on Monday in some other papers, but not as widely as it should have been and not as prominently as it should have been.

I have written before about the strange and disturbing response to the terror attacks in London on 7th July 2005, here

…in which I said ‘London went into severe state-sponsored panic (later misreported as phlegmatic calm) over the bombings. My mobile phone stopped working (as did most others) . It seemed to me to have nothing to do with the alleged network congestion which was later given as the official reason for this. There were no unobtainable tones or ‘network busy’ messages. The phone just did not work at all.

But *before* mobiles stopped working, the BBC crew with which I was spending the morning received a call. (As I remember, we were filming my BBC4 documentary about Britain and the Common Market, ‘This Sceptic Isle’, and interviewing the refreshingly intelligent Lord (Nigel) Lawson, just off Piccadilly). The call ,as far as I could make out from various muttered conversations, instructed them to cease whatever they were doing and to return to TV centre immediately because of a ‘national emergency’.

I am sure I read reports in early editions of the London Evening Standard of troops (not ceremonial , but in battledress and with modern weapons) being deployed in various central London locations. But they were not carried in later editions and I can now find no trace of them. Official accounts do say that important buildings, such as the Houses of Parliament were ‘sealed off’, but do not say who did the sealing, or how. I had the odd feeling that I had glimpsed the outlines of a much more severe response, half-unveiled and then withdrawn when the atrocities turned out to be less extensive than at first feared.

A few weeks later, all-party support was obtained for what would become the Terrorism Act, a measure which originally was intended to introduce 90-day detention, and which also created the unEnglish offence of ‘Glorifying Terrorism’ , which has always sounded to me like something out of the Soviet penal code of 1936. In the hands of a tyrant (and of course we will never have a tyrant here, so no need to worry) , the Act’s vague provisions are a severe blunt instrument. Take a look at them, and also at the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act of 2004, under which Parliamentary government and almost all the ancient constitutional protections in our law could be suspended in seconds.’

Now, it’s my view that troops can do little to help after a terror attack, unless in some way the normal emergency services have been disabled and cannot do their jobs, in which case soldiers , thanks to their discipline, flexibility, familiarity with shocking things and general competence, might be expected to step in – but not as troops.

It’s the nature of terror that it avoids direct clashes with trained armed forces, which would overpower terrorists in any such clash.

It cleverly manoeuvres us into making these attacks more damaging and significant than they are.

Terrorism is like judo. It uses our strength against us. A highly-developed urban civilisation is easily disrupted by relatively small acts of violence. The terrorists are only too happy when we react with emotional hyperbole to these comparatively small attacks, which seldom if ever threaten our political, social or economic stability (the only exception being the IRA’s successful targeting of the City of London, which played a major part in their victory over the British state). I am not here saying that terrorist atrocities are not horrible, evil and worthy of condemnation. I am just saying that our politicians and media make too much of them, and so they do the terrorists’ work. Terror ,as its own proponents say, is 'propaganda of the deed'. They rejoice at the fuss we make.

By comparison with German bombing attacks on London, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Liverpool (for example) terror attacks in modern times have been comparatively small.

Secondly a peaceful civilisation is inclined to panic at any manifestation of the abnormal, especially when such panic is officially encouraged by incessant wailing sirens, often needless, and grim-faced politicians on the TV acting as if we have been invaded.

There are obvious cheap reasons for such behaviour. Any examination of post-terrorism rhetoric from politicians will show that it is usually composed of entirely empty promises to apprehend the culprits, bring them to justice etc, which are usually not fulfilled. When they are, the said culprits are often released soon afterwards in political amnesties and even end up drawing taxpayer-funded salaries.

The terrorists are also called various names, which may or may not be true, and are described as ‘mindless’. This is a curious thing to say, given the high success rate of terror campaigns in achieving their aims, and the large number of former terrorists who have ended up as national leaders or at least as free, prosperous and well-regarded politicians.

Well, all this is by way of business, I suppose. But for me it is the use of terrorism as a pretext for surveillance and increased state power which is the worst of all. And that is why I was so struck, and so dispirited, by this plan for troops to take to the streets.

I felt very sure, in 2005, that elements in the government might have found it convenient( I won’t say they ‘wanted’ this, because I shrink in horror from the thought and do not think it true. These people simply are not that wicked) had the 2005 attacks in London been larger than they were.

Had they been, then some sort of British version of the ‘Patriot Act’ and ‘Homeland Security’, might have been feasible, with lengthy detention without trial, compulsory identity cards , and all the other sick dreams of those who think like this, rushed through an unprotesting and unanimous Parliament, uncriticised by a similarly unprotesting and unanimous press. .

Such people have always existed and emerge like Japanese knotweed when the occasion allows. Give a nobody power, and he will use it (I recall , as a teenage steward at a Trotskyist conference, becoming in an an instant monstrously officious as I wielded my tiny piece of authority, officiously demanding credentials from people I’d known for years. I still blush with shame over it.) The not-famous-enough Zimbardo experiment

seems to me to establish beyond doubt that the desire to feel superior or others, and push them around, is part of the original sin innate in us, and as a result, innate in all state institutions unless restrained by powerful forces. The British state (being as it is the direct inheritor of Henry VII’s despotic government, Star Chamber, High Commission and all), has hereditary tendencies in that direction. I believe that newly-appointed Home Secretaries have for many decades been presented by smirking, oily officials with plans for identity cards, detention without trial, jury abolition, and warrantless searches. Until recently, these politicians had the character and historical knowledge to tell the officials what they could do with these ghastly proposals. Not any more.

In fact, two world wars have allowed much of the securocrat fantasy to become reality. On the pretext of a much greater national danger than any we face now (though it was still a pretext) the state has gained powers which our pre-1914 forebears would never have allowed it.

Read, some time, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/36/contents, and see what astonishing powers the British state could take if it decided they were justified. The legal procedures exist to turn this country into a dictatorship, should anyone with sufficient nerve and determination care to use them. The setting up of the National Crime Agency (originally SOCA), essentially the Home Office’s private police force, is particularly worrying in connection with the CCA. For the first time in modern history civil servants under direct orders from Ministers are empowered to make arrests . Before the NCA was created, this power was normally only enjoyed by police officers sworn to uphold the law and empowered, nay, obliged to resist unlawful orders.

This means its existence is far more of a departure than that of the three semi-national police forces that have quietly come into operation , the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence Police (known in the trade as Modplod) and the (armed) Civil Nuclear Constabulary. All these are composed of sworn officers under a Chief Constable.

The deployment of thousands of armed soldiers on the streets of British cities, not in ceremonial parades but on active duty, would be a huge departure from the practice of nearly two centuries and in my view a long step towards the end of liberty as we know it.

Once deployed, they might well become permanent, like the gates on Downing Street and the armed police who infest central London and major airports. Who would have the courage to withdraw them? And so, just as the presumption of innocence is dying, the presumption of freedom under the law would fade as well, replaced, as if we were in Rangoon, by open displays of state power.

The 1689 Bill of Rights was designed to prevent a standing army on British soil capable of being used against the populace, and for most of the time since then the British Army has been mainly overseas. Since the Peterloo massacre in 1819, there has been a special horror of the use of soldiers to maintain public order, and this was one of the reasons Parliament eventually gave in to calls for a police force.

But Parliament, knowing well what continental police were like, insisted that the police would be unarmed, not under direct government control, definitely not a national force. Their uniforms were to be non-military and understated. They were to act as citizens in uniform, and would have few powers beyond those of normal citizens (all this is detailed in my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’). Bit by bit, especially since around 1965, Parliament’s wishes have been quietly but relentlessly circumvented, so we now have the militarised, armed, glowering state militia that still calls itself the police, but is in fact increasingly what the MPs of the 1820s feared.

And now, it seems, we are to have actual troops on the streets…not yet, but I fear the time will come. Once they start planning for it, you may be sure it will happen. I suspect it will begin with an ‘exercise’ , like the strange performance we saw in London a few weeks ago near the Aldwych. Then another exercise. Then another, until we and they are used to it. And anyone who criticises it will be told he is complacent about, or soft on terror. It is all very sad, and not what my parents’ generation went through the 1939-45 war to bring about.

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10 June 2015 11:03 AM

This is an extended version of a couple of replies I have to contributors on an earlier thread. I think quite a few of my readers have failed to grasp just what a significant moment the election result was for me. For some time I had listened to appeals from readers to ‘get involved’ in politics.

I had explained laboriously to people who think you can just ‘stand as an MP’ and expect to be chosen on your merits, that MPs are in fact selected by parties and then ritually approved by voters at elections where reason and thought are minor influences. Even at by-elections, where tribal voting is less marked, it is almost unknown for a genuine independent to be elected. Yet I still get almost weekly enquiries asking why I do not ‘stand for Parliament’.

I had explained equally laboriously that an individual MP has as much influence on affairs as the lady who hoovers the House of Commons carpets when MPs have gone home. Without a party in which he or she is broadly at home, is listened to and has some hope of ministerial office, an individual MP can do no more than make unreported speeches to an empty chamber late in the evening, ask questions which will almost certainly remain unanswered, and vanish into the obscurity of committee work.

And I had explained what was necessary and possible (within the law and without violence) to open the existing system to people such as me.

These careful, reasoned explanations mainly produced anger and frustration from readers who either had an unswerving loyalty to the Tory party or who insisted on seeing UKIP as a viable party of government.

But I continued to hope that, just possibly, they were having an undetected effect elsewhere.

The result of the 2010 election showed that even a fourth Tory defeat in a row (which I had desired and predicted) could not by itself destroy the attachment of tribal loyalists to that ghastly party. The formation of the Coalition was so swift that many Tory loyalists thenceforward forgot that their party *had* been defeated and were often shocked to be reminded that they were governing in a coalition. They were not, on the other hand, shocked by how easily the Tory Party meshed with the Liberal Democrats, by how little real dissension there was, by how readily, even anxiously, the Tory Party pressed concessions on the Liberal Democrats to obtain agreement. This process, of course completely confirmed my view that the Tory Party is not in its nature conservative at all, and is in many respects the most left-wing of all our major parties in practice. Witness especially the enactment of same-sex marriage when it had not even been in the Tory manifesto, and the devastation of the armed forces, reducing them to levels that might have worried George Lansbury.

The 2015 election underlined the failure of my plea. It showed that left-wing voters care much more about betrayal than conservative ones. The Liberal Democrats were unjustly punished for having gone into coalition with the Tories, even though they had by doing so achieved many of the desires of their supporters. The Tories were not punished at all by their voters for joining a coalition of anti-British leftists and pursuing their aims.

It was plainly impossible to take this seriously any more. The whole thing is an irrational farce in which millions vote merrily against their best interests. Were I to carry on caring about it, I should only make myself very unhappy for no good purpose. I had pretty much resolved on this position after 2010, but the success of UKIP during 2014 caused me to harbour foolish hopes. These might have been fulfilled had the Labour Party not collapsed in Scotland, but it did, and so we are where we are.

And that along with a deep loathing of plebiscites as manipulative and biased in favour of power, is why I decline to get involved in the doomed ‘No’ campaign . (This, by the way is not ‘hesitancy’ as one contributor describes it, but hard undiluted determination to take no part in a wicked deception). It is doomed not just because it will lose, but also because it would not succeed in its aim even if it won. In the absence of a political party committed to British independence, with a Commons majority won on that policy, the United Kingdom will not leave the EU.

Mr Brooks Davis thinks there is ‘still a chance’. He is welcome to his belief. But I do not think any rational person in possession of the facts can actually believe that. And I believe that in temporal matters, facts and logic are indispensable.

Mr Belcher writes : ‘…you admit you were wrong about The Conservatives winning a majority this last General Election - so don't you want to be wrong again in your prediction about the E.U vote in 2016 ? ‘

The very reasons why I was wrong about the election are the reasons I am right about the referendum. In the election I underestimated the power of money, which will be crucial in the referendum, and which, as I wrote last Sunday, will be heavily weighted towards the ‘Yes’ side. I also underestimated the credulity of voters repeatedly told a blatant falsehood. If the British public and media can be persuaded to believe that George Osborne has achieved an economic miracle (and they can be) , they can be persuaded that David Cameron has returned in triumph from Brussels with a package of reforms he can ‘wholeheartedly’ recommend to the voters.

Is my turning aside, in amused disgust, a moral failing or a dereliction of duty? It might be if I had never tried, but, having tried, I do not think so. I have tried quite hard (as I note below) to put across a coherent and civilised case against the modern consensus. I have pretty much completely failed. Why pretend otherwise? My arguments are unwelcome both to my opponents and to my theoretical allies. I think it safe to assume that this is because, whatever they may say, my theoretical allies prefer the apparent (if illusory) comfort and stability of the status quo to the uncertain shadowy paths of resistance. Their unwillingness to risk what I most urgently sought – a Britain without the Tory Party – seems to me to show that, above all things. Their inability to accept that it might (horrors!) be *up to them* to build its replacement was always one of the most striking things about those who rejected my case for boycotting the Tories.

By the way, w ell-meant advice about alternative methods of publishing, websites etc is obviously kindly meant, but such things have a tiny impact, and are trivial compared with access to the public mind granted by mainstream book publishing and terrestrial TV and radio, both increasingly closed to me.

I don’t think the moral law obliges us to thump our heads against stone walls. We should mainly be concerned with reforming ourselves anyway, and there’s never any shortage of work to do there.

This brings me to those two replies.

In reply to Mr 'Of' (who rightly complains that I misattributed his words to Edward O’ Hara, possibly because it was a more credible name)who wrote ‘I assume that PH does not want to legitimise this transparent stitch-up by contributing to a high turnout.’ , I wrote ‘That is a pretty good summary of my position. I never wanted a referendum, I cannot see why any secessionist viewed it as an object worth pursuing and I don't greatly care what the result is (not that I think it is in doubt) as no conceivable British government will take us out of the EU. If other people wish to be played with and mocked in this fashion, that is up to them. I prefer to remain undeceived.

In reply to Mr’Topper’, who wrote: ‘ Despair is a strong word, which few people will genuinely understand, and many will disparage and scoff at. That you find this situation funny I find amazing, since I can only see despair as producing sadness. But perhaps this is because I still have not experienced it in its fullness. However, like you, I am glad that I voted no in 1975, and I even worked hard for the "Get Britain Out" campaign before the referendum.’

I wrote : ‘My despair is purely temporal. I still hope for the eternal triumph of truth and justice. It is also rational. I felt, during the last two elections, that I had a moral duty to advise my readers on the best course of action. I did so, in the simplest and clearest terms, explaining my reasons repeatedly and in detail, meeting all objections with careful rebuttal. Most of them, despite constantly saying how much they valued my views, quibbled, pretended not to understand, asked daft questions about what would happen *after* a Tory collapse, as if I could possibly know, or made silly requests to be told exactly how not to vote Tory, as if it mattered which dustbin they tossed their votes into. I might as well have said nothing at all, and saved my breath and my fingertips. The opportunity which existed in 2010, for real political change, has now gone forever. I am relieved of any responsibility for what happens next, and untroubled by any hope of improvement in that or in any of the other major issues on which I have campaigned. The invariable reaction to my careful research and reasoned arguments has been that I have been ignored or abused. I now face growing limits on what I can even get published ( my broadcasting appearances dwindle daily, I can no longer publish three-dimensional books). What to do? Rational despair, and laughter, while recording the absurdities of the age, seems the best arrangement.’

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31 May 2015 1:08 AM

What is the point of the police if wrongdoers aren’t afraid of them? Yet Durham Constabulary has actually produced a poster chiding parents for using the police as bogeymen.

It pleads: ‘Parents, please don’t tell your children that we will take them off to jail if they are bad. We want them to run to us if they are scared, not be scared of us.’

Is that really what the police are for? If anyone runs to them for aid, it is because they imagine they are fearless defenders of right against wrong, who can be trusted even if they are frightening, and who will scare away bad people. But is that what they now are?

The poster features a picture of a gently smiling officer in a short-sleeved shirt. It leaves out his bottom half, so you cannot see if he is carrying the standard non-confrontational police armoury of clubs, handcuffs, pepper spray and electric-shock dispenser, which he may need to deal with the increasingly violent society which liberal ideas have created.

I am not surprised this comes from Durham, whose Chief Constable, Mike Barton, advocates giving free heroin to criminal drug abusers, and once told me he was ‘proud to be a social worker’.

Now, as it happens, I would never tell a child or teenager to stop doing something in case the police come and arrest him. I know perfectly well that, if I were ever stupid enough to confront an underage wrongdoer, related to me or not, the police would arrest me, not him. I’ve heard or read of quite enough cases where this has happened, especially to people who have tried to defend themselves or their property against feral children.

But millions of people – usually those who have had no recent dealings with this surly and peevish nationalised industry – do retain a simple faith in the police, inherited from another age. They would rather their children were scared of getting into trouble than that they did stupid things. They know that the young all think they are immortal.

Most teenagers can’t – for instance – believe that they could become irreversibly mentally ill after using cannabis. And they come under huge peer pressure to take such drugs at their schools, where cannabis is often sold nearby or on the premises. How useful it would be for their mothers and fathers if they could credibly warn that they risk being caught, given a criminal record and banned for life from travelling to the USA.

But, as the Durham poster makes horribly clear, there is no such risk. The modern police are weird paramilitary social workers, jingling with weapons and armoured with astonishing powers, but not interested in enforcing the laws that matter to us most.

Perhaps one day the few remaining police stations will become heroin dispensaries, serving the people they failed to deter from drug-taking when they were younger.

And so bad people are not afraid of the police, though good people are increasingly afraid of being run in by them for saying the wrong thing.

It’s a pity. Fear is good and useful, when it’s deployed on the side of common sense. But these days what we mainly fear is chaos, and a callous, incompetent state that views us as a nuisance.

How interesting that the new head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, Camilla Cavendish, is an openly declared supporter of the legalisation of drugs. Such a view, publicly expressed on the record, would once have disqualified anyone from this job.

Ms Cavendish was an Oxford contemporary of David Cameron, and even went to the same college. He once signed a Commons report calling for weaker drug policies. Does she say openly what he thinks privately?

A royal luvvies affair

Until recently you could reliably assume that the acting profession and the media were stuffed with fashionable republicans, snobbishly looking down on monarchy. Yet a series of films and plays about our present Queen and her stuttering father seem to have softened the thespians’ radicalism. The latest surprise is the sight of Kate Winslet (who insists her origins are working-class) in A Little Chaos, helping Alan Rickman to soften the image of that tricky old despot, Louis XIV of France. If tough old Lefty Helen Mirren can warm towards the Crown, after impersonating Her Majesty, who’s next? Since reigning and acting have so much in common, it’s surprising all actors aren’t fervent royalists.

George Osborne’s non-existent economic miracle continues. Not only are house prices now galloping upwards in a mad and ruinous frenzy. The official growth figures (about whose first draft the media fell silent in the days before the Election) now confirm that economic growth has slowed violently, dropping to a miserable 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of this year. The main cause is a combination of falling exports and rising imports, invariable symptoms of deep trouble.

Fight IS – and get something even worse

Even though we no longer have an Army worth the name, since David Cameron slashed the defence budget to pay for the scandal known as ‘Foreign Aid’, voices are being raised to suggest that we intervene again in Iraq.

This is clueless in the extreme. If we send soldiers there, RAF Brize Norton will soon be welcoming planes loaded with flag-wrapped coffins – and in the end we will leave, beaten, yet again. The rise of Islamic State is the direct result of two disastrous foreign policy mistakes, both so obviously doomed that even I could see it at the time.

The 2003 overthrow of Saddam and the 2011 Western-backed undermining of the Assad government in Syria were both based on the idea that if you get rid of a tyrant, something better will automatically follow.

This isn’t true. In fact both these adventures released forces we barely understand and cannot control. There is no sign that anyone in London or Washington has learned anything as a result.

Our pious horror at the intolerant and repressive behaviour of Islamic State is bitterly funny, given that it is really not that different from the policies of our close ally, Saudi Arabia.

You may remember that flags flew at half-mast in London recently to mark the death of the Saudi king, and that British Royalty and politicians are frequent honoured guests in the Saudi capital. I am not against our having good relations with Riyadh. It is a sound principle of wise foreign policy to deal with whatever government is firmly in control of the territory.

We recognise many horrible governments all over the world, and have learned to live happily with grisly Sinn Fein right next door. In which case we may soon have to consider dealing with Islamic State too. Don’t rule it out. It may be better than the alternative.

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15 April 2015 11:11 AM

The nearest I ever got to rowing was (unbelievable as it seems to me now, with a BMI of 27.4) as cox of the Leys School, Cambridge’s sixth VIII. They only had six of them. And I was only doing it to get out of playing hockey (what North Americans call ‘field hockey’).

I had always thought of this as a girls’ game, and no school I had ever attended had played it. Suddenly I was confronted with it. A couple of experiences on freezing fenland fields in January persuaded me that it was not for me in any way – a great deal of ridiculous boredom plus the lurking danger of a rather hard ball in the face.

How to escape? I would later pay people to play cricket for me (two shillings seemed to me to be a small price for avoiding an entire afternoon of tedium, and nobody ever noticed that I wasn’t there). But this was Cambridge, where there was another Spring term sport, rowing, and somehow there was a shortage of small, slight persons to be coxes.

No, I wasn’t especially good at it, not least because my voice was half way through breaking and would veer from a boom to a squeak , and perhaps back again, in mid-bellow. But I can still recall the set of commands necessary to turn a thin-skinned and fragile boat round in the middle of the Cam, with a large gin-palace pleasure cruiser bearing down on us. (‘Hitchens!!’ a voice from the bank still echoes in my head, ‘Do you have ANY idea how much that boat COSTS?’ ) . The procedure for lifting the thing out of the river, which I usually managed flawlessly, has by contrast vanished from my mind.

Eventually, we won a race, thanks to the boat in front sinking (one of the crew had put his foot through the bottom and an attempt to stem the leak by stuffing sweaters into it had failed, badly). Still they manfully struggled on, and even as they filled with water we struggled to catch up with them. We just managed to bump them the moment before they went under, which apparently counted.

So I know the difference between bow and stroke, what a slide is and various other arcane things which make me slightly more interested in the boat race than I would otherwise be which, in truth, is not very much.

But on Sunday, during an appearance on the Andrew Marr show on BBC1, in which , together with Lesley Riddoch, I reviewed the newspapers,…

…the subject came up once again. This time it was because of the decision to row the women’s Oxford-Cambridge race on the same day, and on the same course, as the men’s, thus giving it parity with the male version.

I remarked ( as I said, subversively) that the winning women’s crew had taken rather longer to finish the course than the winning men’s crew. The difference was about two minutes, which may not seem much, but is quite a bit in a race (imagine if the Cambridge crew in either race had come in two minutes behind Oxford).

That was all I said, but it didn’t take long for the protests to begin on Twitter, boring, unresponsive, and baseless as they were. Leftist ultra-feminists instinctively understood that what I had said was indeed subversive of their orthodoxy, but didn’t choose to ask themselves why. For to do so is to admit something about modern ultra-feminism that they do not wish to admit, that it is no longer a reasonable quest for reasonable equality, but a dogma-driven attack on the married family and on the historic division of labour between men and women, based fundamentally on the fact that women bear children ( and nourish small babies) and men don’t.

It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this argument, whether you think that this attack is a good or a bad thing. I think most readers here know that I think it a bad thing, and know why I think it a bad thing. What does matter is that it is advanced under a false flag, and that many of those who give in to it do so without understanding what it is that they are giving in to. This must surely be wrong. If we wish to make deep and radical reforms in our society, then we should call them by their proper names.

Instead, they accused me, quite falsely of arguing that the women’s crews didn’t deserve any praise ( I don’t think this ) or of misogyny (I am not a misogynist). I suspect they don’t even know what the word means, and use it as a grandiose substitute for ‘sexist’.

Now of course, it is difficult for anyone, in practice, not to be a ‘sexist’, as men and women have many important differences, and if we did not treat them differently in many ways, all the time, we would run into all kinds of trouble. Everybody knows this, but, so that the word can be used as if it were the exact equivalent of ‘racist’, everyone pretends not to know it and feigns shock or outrage when it is pointed out. By confusing ‘sexism’ with ‘racism’ one also avoids any real examination of the claim that is being made. Racism (or racialism as I still prefer to call it) is repulsive precisely because it is unreasoning and stupid. To treat someone differently from someone else *when he or she is not different* is the essence of unreasoning stupidity.

That is also why it is ridiculous to have denied women education, equal pay for equal work, legal autonomy, property rights or the vote. The differences between the sexes simply do not affect such things.

But the next stage of feminism seems to me to have moved out of the area of reason and fact, and into the zone of dogma.

There is a new belief, that the evident and undeniable differences between women and men must henceforth be treated as if they did not exist. This seems to me to be more or less the reverse of late 19th and early 20th century feminism, which rightly pointed out that women were being denied the freedom to do things they were perfectly capable of doing, because *in such matters* there was no difference between the sexes.

This stage of feminism was, I think, content to accept mid-20th-century restrictions on women serving in the armed forces, or the police, or the fire service, or in heavy industry. It did not regard such restrictions as irrational or as unfair discrimination, but as reasonable distinctions between the sexes based on undeniable generalities. These generalities were that women, on average, have far less upper body strength than men; and that women alone are capable of bearing children. Indeed, to this day, many low-prestige occupations demanding physical strength – the crewing of dustcarts and the building trade being the obvious examples, though one might think also of deep-sea fishing and what remains of coalmining – remain almost totally male-dominated and face no campaigns to alter this, no quotas or anything like them.

The armed forces, the police and the fire service are under pressure to change because they are high-status occupations, much admired by children looking for examples.

It is true that some women do have as much upper body strength as most men. It is true that some women cannot bear children, and that some do not wish to do so. But in general, these facts are a rational basis for generally different treatment –provided that rational exceptions are made when justified by the facts.

Why depart from this reasonable view, and move to the dogmatic position that all discrimination, even when it has a rational basis, is in itself wrong?

Did we, in fact, do so? I believe we did, in the interesting case of Gillian Maxwell, pursued and won by by then then Equal Opportunities Commission in 1996-1997.

The story was as follows : 5ft 3in Mrs Maxwell applied to be a firefighter. She was turned down by the Northern Ireland Fire Authority because she was not tall enough, under the provisions of Fire Services Act of 1947 which stipulated a minimum height of 5 feet 6 inches. With the support of the EOC, she took them to an employment tribunal, arguing that the existing height rule discriminated against women *because it excluded 60 per cent of the female population*.

(I first wrote about this case and its implications many years ago, in this 2002 article:

I notice, looking back at it, that I use the word ‘extremists’, a mistake I regret, would not now make and which I would correct if I returned to the subject. )

This argument was enough to overturn the 1947 Fire Services Act.

Note the reason for the ruling. It wasn’t that anyone had established that it was a good idea to lower the height restriction, but that the height restriction was axiomatically wrong *because it ‘discriminated against 60% of women’*. That is to say, it made it impossible for 60% of women to join the Fire Service. How many of those women under 5’6”in height actually wanted to join the fire service it is very hard to say. I doubt if there are any records that could be usefully studied, especially now, 18 years after the rule was lifted. But I would guess that it was not very many. I imagine it also prevented quite a large number of men from joining. But that was not ‘discrimination’, in the sense in which it is used here.

How do we know? Because no man could have successfully brought this case. He could not have maintained that the rule discriminated against him *because he was male*. Nor could he have said it discriminated against him because he was short, as the EOC and its successors have never made physical height a protected status (an attribute through which one could be ‘discriminated’ against in the modern sense). Discrimination is merely a long word for ‘choice’. We discriminate when we choose one pizza instead of another . A discriminating person used to be a person of good judgement. But in its modern meaning it is automatically wrong and a tort in law. But only in certain defined matters, chosen for political reasons.

Oddly enough, it is quite possible that the main effect of this ruling has in fact been to stop ‘discrimination’ against weedy men by the Fire Brigade. It doesn’t really matter to those who pursued the case. Theirs is an ideological aim, not a practical one.

The number of women in the brigade (and there were significant numbers of women firefighters before this decision, who had passed the old physical tests with ease) is still quite small . In 2009, the latest year for which I have figures, it was said to be 3.3 per cent, well short of the 15 per cent target set by the then Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1999. This is despite incessant government campaigns for female recruitment, and a general reduction in physical demands for the job . In the period after 1997 the entry requirements changed considerably. They did not get tougher. Chest expansion and lung capacity tests were dropped. A simple trial - carrying a 12-stone man for 100 yards in less than a minute - was scrapped.

I do not believe any studies have been carried out on the effect of this on the fire service itself. How would one tell for certain without an incredibly detailed and intrusive investigation? My own suspicion would be that, as in the police, greater height and upper-body strength may well be an advantage in certain specific circumstances.

As it happens, thanks to the decline in smoking, the greatly increased use of fire-retardant materials in buildings and furniture, huge improvements in electrical wiring, the virtual disappearance of open fires and the mass introduction of smoke alarms, much of the Fire Service’s work is now preventive (the opposite of what has happened to the police, who have become almost wholly reactive). What’s more, even after 16 years of pressure, the Fire Service still contains a large number of old-fashioned firemen. No doubt, in emergencies, all work together as hard as they can to ensure the safety of the public. Maybe they have to work harder to achieve this than they did under the old rules. But outsiders would never know.

Another formerly male-dominated service, the morale and discipline of the seagoing Royal Navy, were ( according to a huge amount of anecdotal evidence, occasionally supported by lurid courts martial) damaged by the decision to allow women to go to sea in warships. But the political view was that this had to be done, and done it was. An in-depth study of the outcome would not be welcome. In my experience, the modern Navy is far more reluctant than it used to be to allow journalists to spend time aboard HM ships at sea.

It may well be that the image of the Fire Service and the reality are now so far apart, that its old role as a rough tough brigade of big strong men who could carry an unconscious fatty out of a running building and down a ladder, is as outdated as the idea of a train driver being a soot-stained bloke leaning out of a rain-swept cab while his fireman colleague shovelled coal into a roaring furnace. You don’t get much fuss these days about women drivers of trains, do you? Though I’m not sure how many there are.

But as long as that image persists, I suspect the ultra-feminists will have the Fire Service high on their list as a target for politically-driven change. Likewise the police and the armed services will never be free of this pressure. At all costs the old Ladybird-book idea of the division of labour between men and women must be erased and replaced by one in which every high-status job can be and is done by women exactly as men do, and the raising of children must not be assumed to have any effect on this at all. Indeed, it must be assumed *not* to have any effect on it. Any mention of real differences between the sexes is subversive of this dogma, and will become increasingly frowned upon until it is impossible.